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Part of
Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English: Literary and linguistic approaches
Edited by Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 312] 2020
► pp. 75–99

Blunders and (un)intentional offence in Shakespeare

| Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

Neither literary nor linguistic investigations seem to offer a clear pragmatic description of blunder. Blunders in social communication are popularly associated with gaffes, which are incidental offences that could have been avoided if the speaker had foreseen their offensive or perplexing consequences. It has been claimed (Wierzbicka 2003) that errors and blunders are mostly committed when speakers venture into “unsafe territory” (2003: 283), which makes it easier to make a serious mistake or to embarrass the interlocutor by not taking enough care or not thinking enough. Blunders in Early Modern literature, however, have never been pragmatically analysed even though they form a distinctive linguistic feature of some Shakespearean characters’ speech. This chapter analyses the linguistic behaviour of two comedy characters from Shakespeare’s plays, Mistress Quickly and Falstaff, with special emphasis on the effects of their blunders and how blunders affect both the speaker and the hearer. The aim of the chapter is twofold. First, I try to provide a pragmatic definition of blunder in relation to speech act theory and intentionality and explain how blunders are pragmatically different from gaffes. Next, I describe the perlocutionary effects of blunders based on the examples of Shakespeare characters’ speech and demonstrate how blunders can be employed as a means of literary characterisation.

Keywords: blunder, impoliteness, face-threatening acts, banter, intentionality, embarrassability, humour, comedy, William Shakespeare
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Blunders: Pragmatic description and their effects
    • 2.1Blunders as FTAs
    • 2.2Blunders, intentionality and impoliteness
    • 2.3Blunders as speech acts: Illocutionary force and unintentional perlocutionary effects
      • 2.3.1Embarrassment and embarrassability
      • 2.3.2Humour
  • 3.Blunders in The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2
    • 3.1Mistress Quickly
    • 3.2Falstaff
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 11 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.312.04kiz
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